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XBradTC

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Are we losing the art of digging? – Think Defence

In the last decade or more of operations in the Middle East, the enemy’s that British forces have faced had not had a great deal of indirect fire capability. Although Iraqi forces in 2003 certainly did have them and used them, they were relatively few in number. In Afghanistan, the majority of indirect fire threat…

In the last decade or more of operations in the Middle East, the enemy’s that British forces have faced had not had a great deal of indirect fire capability. Although Iraqi forces in 2003 certainly did have them and used them, they were relatively few in number. In Afghanistan, the majority of indirect fire threat was from mortars and recoilless rifles. To counter, investments in Counter Rockets and Mortars (C-RAM) capability were made; Base-ISTAR, EXACTOR, ground mounts for Phalanx CIWS and lightweight mortar detection radars for example. In addition to the active means of defending fixed locations against sporadic indirect fire, force protection engineering enjoyed a resurgence; HESCO, Defencell and Expeditionary Elevated Sangars for example.Because operations were conducted from a fewer number of fixed locations they was no need to ‘dig in’.

Source: Are we losing the art of digging? – Think Defence

One of the nice things about switching from dismount to Bradley crew was I no longer had to dig two-man fighting positions.

There was still quite  a bit of manual labor involved, but not nearly the backbreaking chore of digging a quality two man position and adding overhead cover.

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  1. GGinNC

    I don’t miss digging foxholes, but having raised a daughter, letting suitors know that I’d received specific training on quickly digging deep, camouflaged holes in rugged terrain brought me a certain amount of comfort.

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  2. Esli

    If the fact that I had to spend an hour with an engineer dozer crew because nobody In in their platoon had ever dug in a tank before, I’d say yes.

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  3. KenWats

    To be fair to the dozer crew, dozers (back in my day, when dinosaurs walked the earth) are usually a part of CSE (Combat Support Equipment) or Combat-Heavy Engineer Battalions (or Corps-Wheeled, yay 14th Engineers!). They’re mostly trained to make roads, not 2 tier fighting positions. Back in the day, like it or not, the ACE guys would be the ones who practiced making fighting positions regularly.

    Now. Somebody with a little castle on their collar or a 12 in the front of their MOS (again showing my age here) should have had control of those dozers and been making sure they were doing good work. A pair of dozers, properly employed will keep up with the rest of your ACE squad (depending on soil conditions and how good your ACE squad is anyway). Not properly employed, they’re a waste of gas.

    That being said, those dozers are often attached and reattached and moved around so often if you don’t know they’re in your AO you may not know to look for them. Not much of an excuse though, given how sweet they are when they show up.

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  4. Kirk

    The only thing that substitutes for a D7 bulldozer in digging fighting positions is a D8. The only thing that substitutes for a D8 is a D9… The ACE is a sad joke, intended to spread hydraulic fluid about the battlefield for some unknown reason, best known to the people who designed it. Who, by the way, started back in 1945-ish, and took until the 1980s to get something into the field. They’d have done better to concentrate on building better prime movers for the D7s.

    I’ve got one good thing to say about the ACE: It made a bunch of money for the hydraulics people, that’s for damn sure. I watched one single specific ACE at the NTC go through over $9,000.00 in custom-fabricated hoses, and God alone knows how many gallons of hydraulic fluid in just one rotation; I shudder to think of how much hydraulic fluid was introduced to the environment by that thing, because I know for a fact that it started the rotation with a full 55-gallon drum of the stuff in the bowl, and ran out less than half-way through. We used to call those things rolling hazmat sites, and you could usually tell where they’d been when the unit stopped for the night.

    Anyone that tells you that they’re going to be putting hydropnuematic suspensions onto a piece of earthmoving equipment is either delusional, or trying to rip you off. No seal in the world can withstand what happens when you hit boulders with the blade, digging a tank in. There’s a reason why bulldozers have zip for suspensions, folks: They don’t work. Well, more than once, anyway…

    And when you’re also using the suspension to control the blade height, as with the ACE? LOL… The people who designed that thing apparently never actually went out with the heavy junkers to try to dig in anything at night, ‘cos they sure as hell designed for the most optimistic, best-case scenario imaginable. I think they must have tested the ACE in sand dunes, or something.

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  5. KenWats

    Kirk, don’t disagree with you at all. Dozers are much better. Can’t always count on getting the lowboys to where the tanks need to be dug in though.

    ACEs are fine for knocking down sand berms, filling in a tank ditch, and maybe scratching out something real quick. Get down into the rock and yes (unless they’ve improved them since my time, and it sounds like not) they’ll break. Although I had one PFC who could make it sing. He’d dig about half the holes for the whole squad.

    Lots of dumb design decisions involved in trying to make something that can 1) dig a 2 tiered fighting position for a tank; 2) be armored; and 3) keep up (kinda) with the tanks and brads. Don’t get me started on the aluminum blades and aluminum road wheels, the “swim kit”, and all the other stupidity that was in the process of being corrected when I got out 15 years ago.

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  6. Kirk

    Yeah… The ACE is what happens when some genius decides that they can design their way out of the box created by real-world conditions and physical laws… Kinda like the SEE.

    I did my twenty-five years as an enlisted Combat Engineer, and a few years of that were in the glorious 14th Engineers. Also, divisional mech, and a few other slots. I never saw any of that crap really work, where the designers were trying to cram seven different functions into one piece of equipment. A piece of digging equipment that can also keep up with moving armored columns? Uhmmm… Yeah. Sure.

    They’d have done better to design some stuff that could do a better job of providing mobility to standard earth-moving equipment. The combination we had, of the M916 tractor and low boy trailers was decent, but not really effective for keeping up with the tankers. Maybe a set of clamp-on wheels for the D7, so you could tow the damn thing at a high rate of speed?

    Whatever the real solution is, I’m pretty sure we’re going to find that it isn’t some half-ass bastardized bit of kit that looks like the ACE. Especially when you consider that it is the one piece of equipment in the column that has the stupidity of a one-man crew and crew compartment. Gee, why is that ACE wandering all over the combat trail, and hitting stuff? Oh, is the operator falling asleep because he’s exhausted, after driving all day without relief? Is he confused, down in the breach, because he’s trying to keep up with what’s going on, tactically, over the radio, and trying to do his job of driving the vehicle and filling in the tank ditch at the same time? Gee… Was making this abortion a one-man rig really a good idea? I don’t think so, Vern…

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